She raced back to her room and found her boyfriend was asleep in her bed and she told him what happened.

He was angry and stormed out while she stayed alone in her room, wondering if what had just happened to her was rape. She texted two friends for advice.

"I was like, 'I feel violated. This feels wrong. But I don’t know if it’s illegal,'" she wrote.

Finney's boyfriend confronted Ward and they went to the police, who conducted an investigation into what happened.

Ward was taken into custody on the same day and admitted to police that what Finney had described was accurate, according to a Tippecanoe police affidavit.

He admitted he believed that Finney thought he was her boyfriend, and when asked why he thought this, he told police: "Because she got very close to me."

In the affidavit, which didn't name Finney, police wrote of probable cause: "Ward indicated he had sexual intercourse with Victim #1 knowing she believed him to be her boyfriend."

Tippecanoe County prosecutors then made the decision to charge Ward with two counts of rape.

However, a loophole emerged: what Ward did isn't technically defined as rape under Indiana Law.

In 41 states across the US, rape is legally defined as sex compelled through force or threats or if the victim can't consent or is unaware that the sex is occurring, consent isn't expressly defined in the statute.

The case went to trial, but after two days of testimony and a few hours of deliberation, Ward was dealt a 'not guilty' verdict and acquitted, with the rape charges expunged from his record.

Finney said she knew after the first 'not-guilty' decision was announced that he would get off and she was angry about it.

"I felt like I’d wasted a year of my life because I could’ve been trying to heal, but instead I was reopening the wound over and over again,” said Finney.

Finney said her therapist has called the trial a "second trauma" and she feels like she had to go through it all for no reason.

In the wake of Finney's case, there has been a push from US lawmakers, as well as sexual assault activists, to criminalise rape by fraud and better define what it means to give consent.